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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

There have been a number of people who have asked me for example code on how to use Woodstock (Visual JSF) add/remove component examples. I have decided to post a proof-of-concept piece for people to use. It is using Woodstock 4.3 Build 7, but should work on 4.2 if you change the theme library to use 4.2 in the code.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Just finished examining the GlassFish Application Server Refcardz by Masoud Kalali. The reference card is very well done, but is targeted primarily at new administrators. The information contained on the card is in digestible well defined topics. It provides the Cliff Notes™ version of the installation and administration guides. It is perfect for new administrators who may need a quick reference on how to set up and administer GlassFish.

If you are a developer, or administrator who is using GlassFish for the first time; I would recommend it with 4/5 stars.

If you are a seasoned Glassfish developer, or administrator, I would give it 2/5 stars, only because of its limited usefulness.

I just finished reading a white paper from InformIT. It is essentially excerpts from a number of books from well know authors like Joshua Bloch, and Kent Beck. The sections they included were good, but like all good things...they must come to an end.

The sections did not cover the topics in their entirety, and in most cases ended in the middle of a topic. It is a taste teaser. I will note that although you really can't accomplish much from the excerpts, it does give you a good feel for the books and authors.

Saturday, November 01, 2008

I downloaded and installed ICEFaces 1.7.2 and its modules for NetBeans 6.1. My conclusion is that is not ready for primetime on NetBeans.

I would recommend that you read the release notes very carefully. The newest version of ICEFaces is not JSF 1.2 compliant. It needs to run in compatibility mode. This requires you to modify the faces-config.xml and web.xml files. This is a major pain point.

The next thing I noticed is that the design-time implementations are not complete. The ability to visually manipulate the components needs some serious work.

I attempted to do one of the tutorials to create a CRUD application using Netbeans. It was very flaky and did not cover the details adequately. In the end I got the application to deploy, and I could click on the table rows, but it did not work as it did in the tutorial.

I have used ICEFaces in the past and I do like their product in general, but it needs to come up to speed with the rest of the world on JSF 1.2 .Its support for NetBeans needs to have more than token capabilities, and it should account for its compatibility issues without intervention from the end user.

I just read a white paper from Sun called the The Java Developer's Guide to Web Development It is published on Internet.com. I was totally unimpressed. It is a collection of short articles on web frameworks including Wicket, Struts, Stripes, Tapestry, MyFaces, and Spring MVC.

The articles are too short to give you a good feel for the frameworks. At the end of the white paper I felt that I had just wasted a good couple of hours going over it. If you get an email from SDN on it, don't waste your time. I did it for you.